Pat Carroll, Arte Johnson, Nanette Fabray, Richard Dawson
Henri Lemothe from Sparta, New Jersey: “I’m going to dive from the top of the stage into 16 inches of water”
Though Steve says the show staff thinks Lemothe may be the only person who does this, shallow diving dates back at least to 19th century circus performers. Lemothe himself started in the 1920s (he’s 68 here) and performed some 2000 dives in his career, including an annual jump off the Flatiron Building in New York City from 1954 to 1974. Perhaps the most famous modern practitioner of this specific art form is Darrin Taylor, a Guinness record-holder with multiple TV appearances who calls himself “Professor Splash.”
Judith Miles from Lexington, Massachusetts brings with her two spiders in clear boxes: “My spiders will be sent to outer space”
Judith is a high school student who entered a NASA contest
that encouraged young people to suggest experiments that could be performed on
the new Skylab space station. Hers was
one of 25 winners from thousands of submissions received. NASA experts planned to study the effect of
weightlessness on the female cross spiders, especially with regard to their web
spinning abilities. The study would find
that the spiders spun a web not much different than what they would create on
earth. Neither spider would survive the
trip. Skylab was NASA’s first major
project following the Apollo lunar missions.
Between May 1973 and February 1974 it hosted three different astronaut
crews running hundreds of experiments.
In the years that followed, the unmanned station’s orbit decayed. In 1979, it disintegrated in the atmosphere,
spreading debris over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.
Special guest Dom DeLuise: “I’m hatching an ostrich egg”
A divider prevents the panel from seeing that DeLuise is sitting in a large nest. Steve later says there’s an actual ostrich incubating, but the only egg we see is an empty prop, and at one point a live goose is introduced to add to the slapstick shenanigans. Though not mentioned on the show, the goose was provided by the Goebel family, who raise exotic animals on a farm in the mountains of southern California. Their camels would be featured later in the season. DeLuise is familiar to television audiences for his work as a character actor and on several variety shows. His film work, including multiple associations with both Mel Brooks and Burt Reynolds, was for the most part ahead of him. Starting in the 80s he would become a popular voice actor in animated features.
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